When you look at the dance crew Fanny Pak, you might have the same reaction as renowned choreographer Shane Sparks.

“When I first heard the name I was like, OK, what the heck is that? How did they get on the show?” said Sparks, who watches Fanny Pak every week as a judge on MTV’s hit show Randy Jackson Presents: America’s Best Dance Crew and does hip hop choreography for Fox’s So You Think You Can Dance. “Even looking at them you still look at them like, who are these people?”

It’s hard to peg a group of twenty somethings who wear 80's clothing for the fun of it. It doesn’t help when the Valley-based Fanny Pak call their style of dancing a mesh of training between hip hop and jazz that makes some sort of funky, contemporary hip hop.

“It’s like the rich guy that’s walking down the street. You look at him and he’s in a pair of shorts and flip flops and you’re like, why are you here? And then you talk to him and he owns the whole street,” Sparks said on July 15 on the set of ABDC. “That’s what Fanny Pak is. They’re that crew. They’re that group that walks down the street, and you’d never know who they are. They’re not trying to get attention. But when it’s time to do their job, they blow everybody away.”

Fanny Pak has blown everybody away for six weeks on ABDC and as of press time, had made it to the final four dance crews. Fanny Pak competes with hip-hop groups and break dancing groups, but have stayed on the show by dancing with a style and flair all their own.

The members of Fanny Pak are Matt Cady, Phil Collins, Chatsworth native and CSUN alum Beau Fournier, CSUN student Tiffani Grant, Cara Horibe, Megan Lawson, and Glenda Morales, who lived mostly out of her car and on her friends' couches for about seven months leading up to the ABDC competition.

Once they made it past the live audition show and into the final 10, it didn’t look like Fanny Pak was going to get much of a chance at first. But they were able to quickly turn the tables.

Fanny Pak met while taking various classes taught by Cady, a Birmingham High graduate, at Debbie Reynolds Dance Studio in North Hollywood. After auditions that took place nationwide, 14 dance crews were invited to the live auditions on MTV on June 7 and from there, the crews were paired down to 10 and they got the chance to compete for the title of America’s Best Dance Crew.

America votes on their favorite groups, with all but the bottom two groups getting a guaranteed spot in the following week’s show. The two crews with the least amount of votes compete head-to-head, and one crew gets sent home by judges Sparks, rapper Lil Mama, and JC Chasez of N*SYNC fame. On the first show, Fanny Pak was in the bottom two and narrowly missed elimination.

“If I was a non-dancer I don’t know if I would have fallen in love with us right from the live audition,” said Fournier, who attended Chaminade in high school. “It takes a long time to get a new style. It’s not like we’re trying to do what everyone else is doing because that would be boring and not on point, basically.”

The fans seemed to mirror that. They didn’t take to Fanny Pak right away, but it didn’t take long for them to catch on.

Fanny Pak was in the bottom three the week of the fourth episode, but had maybe their best performance on July 10. The challenge for the week was dancing to a slow song, and then transitioning to a faster section.

Dancing to “Touch My Body” by Mariah Carey, they were dressed as if they were at an 80's prom, with one girl, Lawson, poisoning the punch. Their transition to the fast part was their reaction to the poison.

ABDC host Mario Lopez said after the performance that Fanny Pak brought the house down.

“This group totally deserves to be here,” Lil Mama said while judging their performance. “Y’all are so underestimated.”

The performance caused Sparks to call them his favorite group.

“I’ve been trying to tell people that it’s not all about break dancing, it’s not all about popping, it’s not all about jazz. It’s not all about individual style,” Sparks said. “It’s about being able to do it all and bring it to one show, bring it to one performance. When you do a dance show out there, you captivate a few people. When you do a dance performance, you captivate everybody.

“And that’s the difference. Fanny Pak does a performance,” Sparks added. “They do shows. They entertain you. It’s not just a one and two and three and four, you know what I mean? That’s what that group has, and that’s why they’re going to keep killing everybody every week.”

ABDC airs Thursdays on MTV at 10 p.m. With four crews left, it's hard to say how much longer Fanny Pak will be on the show. But they've enjoyed just about every moment of it.

“I can’t even single one thing out because everything we do from the time we wake up to the time we go to sleep, it’s life-changing,” said Grant after the July 15 show. “And, the fact that we’ve been able to inspire people has inspired us to push on and want to go further. So the whole entire experience is absolutely amazing.”